


The AIDS Crisis in The Queen of the Damned

by starshine_shimmyshufflesmile



Category: Vampire Chronicles - Anne Rice
Genre: American History, Analysis, Commentary, HIV/AIDS, Interrogating the subtext from a 1980's perspective, Nonfiction, Spoilers, VC fandom history, literary criticism, reference
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-10-04
Updated: 2019-12-01
Packaged: 2020-11-23 10:33:41
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 5
Words: 12,111
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20890679
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/starshine_shimmyshufflesmile/pseuds/starshine_shimmyshufflesmile
Summary: 1st rule of VampChron: Read between the lines."Being blind to the book's dark, gothicly distorted mirror of the AIDS crisis compromises understanding as badly as reading any of the series through heteronormative goggles."





	1. The AIDS Crisis in The Queen of the Damned

**Author's Note:**

> Discourse, circa 1990.  
I am pleased to hear all opinions and do not moderate public comments. Email is in my profile. Let's talk about it.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Discourse, circa 1990.

The Queen of the Damned is an AIDS book. That was understood and commonly discussed in the late 80's and early 90's and it astonished me to find that it's apparently been lost to our abused and fractured fandom.

The idea that Rice is not aware that she structured this gothic horror novel as an AIDS crisis allegory is not credible to me. If one wants to be thorough about this 30 year old interpretation it looks like this:

  * Akasha is the monstrous embodiment of 80's american society's reaction to AIDS. She evokes both terror of ugly death that seemed to come out of nowhere and the horror of religious and political response that people 'deserved to die', 'society would be better without them'. 
  * In this book (only) the vampires occupy the symbolic space of people with full blown AIDS; they are doomed to die if they can't find a solution to the crisis.
  * In this book the mortal characters are representative of the people at risk of AIDS, Baby Jenks the injection drug using sex worker, Daniel the gay man, and Jesse vulnerable because of her heritage (she serves as a hemophiliac metaphor and a reminder of the Holocaust on that score), and when she is injured and Mael gives her Blood in a hospital she also becomes the representative of the people exposed to AIDS via blood transfusion.
  * The concept of 'being HIV positive' simply did not exist in 1985, when TQOTD is set. No test to screen individuals for HIV antibodies was available before spring 1985, and it was still uncertain at that time if HIV always developed into AIDS. In practice, you were either sick with AIDS, a swift death sentence because there was no treatment, or helplessly lived in fear you'd been exposed and might become sick. That context, and the context of just how terrible dread of the horrifically stigmatized epidemic was and how pervasive the effects were on 80's society, is now largely lost on younger readers.
  * In the book, the only one of the three that symbolically develops full blown AIDS is Baby Jenks; she dies. Daniel and Jesse, in becoming immortal, are symbols of hope: TQOTD has a happy ending, with a very realistic razor blade in it: only the privileged, lucky, and loved Daniel and Jesse, not the impoverished, thrown away Baby Jenks could survive long enough for a solution to the crisis to be found. 
  * In this book Lestat represents americans for whom the system works; he's a beneficiary of the 20th century cultural revolution, a successful rockstar. But he's been blindsided and had his own plans subverted by the crisis: friends die and he himself is in danger. 
  * Akasha is a good parable for the harm maximisIng actions of the politically and religiously powerful during the crisis. From the needless deaths they caused right down to their crude, punitive bronze age religious philosophies and fascist justifications that the world could be forced into a 'better' place by removing 'the wrong people' from it. Just like Akasha, what they did they did with malice aforethought, actions springing from arrogance and hate in their hearts. 
  * Akasha tries to seduce Lestat into believing that those who are suffering are 'less than', 'sinners' and that the death toll can be part of an agenda that advantages him. Lestat redeems himself in the end by choosing solidarity and compassion for the 'little people' she heartlessly destroys.
  * The fact that Akasha terrorizes mortals of color in developing countries was not thoughtless: that is precisely where the most extreme burden of AIDS was projected to, and has indeed, hit.

I don't quite know how to engage with the idea I've seen proposed, that Anne was exploitative in writing a book about gay blood drinkers in the 80's and not giving people living with AIDS representation because again: the. whole. damn. book. is. about. AIDS. But a 2019 revisionist view of the book would still not read Daniel nor Jesse as actively sick with AIDS, it would read them both as that modern concept 'people living with HIV'.

The 'Daniel dying of AIDS' headcanon. The text says dying due to alcoholism, the subtext reads drank himself to death in response to AIDS terror, and I can personally assure anyone that in those terrifying and hopeless times some symptomless people who thought they were likely exposed did indeed self destruct.

I don't hate the Daniel dying of AIDS headcanon. My family lost two people to AIDS in the mid 90's. One of them was a VC fan, and I can't think of a more wonderful, embraceable use for Daniel than to remember him. Thing is, I think the woman I lost to AIDS deserves remembering in Jesse too.

And I'll be frank: if done, it needs doing with care: the cruelty of breaking canon that when changed into a vampire the Blood does not remove physical deformities or aging markers (please see Magnus) but does completely heal any damage from illness or disease (please see Gabrielle) for the sole purpose of preserving recognizable, still stigmatizing, AIDS wasting syndrome in Daniel's body, as I've seen done in some fanworks, is a nightmare adaptation scenario to me. It feels like the subtextual equivalent of forcing him to wear a big red stigmatizing 'A' for eternity and feels like his headcanonned death from 'sinner's disease' implies him the sole character unworthy of Riceian vampiric perfection, it reads as hate to me.

And yes, I am aware it was not intended that way. And yes, the density of the irony does floor me.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Anne was not wrong in her analysis of the horrifying implications of the currents of bigotry, authoritarianism and cruelty in american society the AIDS crisis spotlighted. Nor was she mistaken about the only things that will ever save us: compassion, solidarity and flat refusal to allow tyrants to rule. 
> 
> Take care of each other.


	2. Contextualizing Baby Jenks

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> AIDS death in the underclass: Who will weep for the short, luckless life of a young girl?

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> page references are to  
“The Queen of the Damned.” by Anne Rice. 1988, Alfred A. Knopf. Hardbound, 448 pages. ISBN 0-394-55823-5.  


The frame of TQOTD takes place in the last ten days of October, 1985. Real life events that post-date the frame do not effect the characters in universe, although they clearly influenced the writing.

The first of Akasha's victims is called Baby Jenks, and her experience of seeing some unknown, terrifying force killing vampires is the reader's introduction to the crisis that shapes the novel.

Baby Jenks is the first of our three mortal characters to be brought over, in the summer ("last summer when they'd done it to her, made her one of the Dead" p39) of 1985, and is already a vampire when we meet her in her chapter. Symbolically this represents her having already developed full blown AIDS. Her short story is presented first; the first piece of a pattern. Daniel, who knows he has likely been exposed and lives in fear of becoming sick and dying will be brought over during his chapter. Jesse, who is not aware she's been exposed will not be brought over until after the end of her chapter, in the All Hallow's Eve chapter.

Baby Jenks is the youngest of the three and has the lowest social and economic status, again this is the start of a hierarchical pattern between the three. Even more damagingly, she has no community or family. She is a child either thrown away or run away ("that's what had got her into trouble, got her to Detroit, an asshole in a Cadillac convertible" p44) from a father implied to be abusive ("You little slut!" p49) and a mother who, for unexplored reasons, is in denial and unresponsive to her child. Rather than take action, the mother has chosen to withdraw into comforting religious hobbies and be willfully blind to what is happening. ("everything her mother had ever done that got to Baby Jenks and made her disgusted. Going to church, that was bad enough, but talking the way she did to people so sweet and just putting up with her husband's drinking and always saying nice things about everybody. Baby Jenks never bought a word of it. She used to lie there on her bunk in the trailer thinking to herself, What really makes that lady tick? When is she going to blow up like a stick of dynamite? Or is she just too stupid? Her mother had stopped looking Baby Jenks in the eye years ago. When Baby Jenks was twelve she'd come in and said, "You know I done it, don't you? I hope to God you don't think I'm no virgin." And her mother just faded out, like, just looked away with her eyes wide and empty and stupid, and went back to her work, humming like always as she made those seashell crosses." p47).

There is basically one reason why children of 14 end up alone and homeless on the streets of America: that choice is perceived to be safer than home. For about half, that's because they were thrown out of the home. For about 68-79% of females, they were sexually and/or physically abused in the home. It was true in the 80's, it's still true now.

[ https://web.archive.org/web/20180119214757/https://www.nytimes.com/1986/02/10/style/study-finds-that-abuse-causes-children-to-flee.html ](https://web.archive.org/web/20180119214757/https://www.nytimes.com/1986/02/10/style/study-finds-that-abuse-causes-children-to-flee.html)

The Sexual Abuse to Prison Pipeline <http://rights4girls.org/wp-content/uploads/r4g/2015/02/2015_COP_sexual-abuse_layout_web-1.pdf>

By the time "she'd been fourteen" (p39, the wording implies she has since turned 15, placing her birth in late summer or early fall of 1970), Baby Jenks ends up being prostituted ("Ain't you cute, little girl!" he'd said. Same damn thing the pimp had said to her when he made her braid her hair and put plastic barrettes in it before she went out on the street" p40) and intravenously injecting (refered to as "mainline" p42) heroin ("high on heroin" also refered to as "horse" p40) until a botched back-alley abortion comes within moments of killing her ("bleeding to death, the doctor had done it to her all right, the baby was gone and all, but she was going to die too, he'd cut something in there, and she was so high" p40).

She is brought into darkness by a relatively young vampire who has made a found family in the form of a wandering vampire biker club ("The Fang Gang" p43). They are outsiders from the world of coven houses and powerful vampire elders ("Killer said, "We're rogues to them, they wanna run everything. Like they don't think we have a right to be Dead," p44) and idolize Lestat as a rebel and an empowering truth teller ("He knows that it's the truth. That's what he's been telling everybody with these songs --and it's the truth" p45).

The Fang Gang plans to travel to Lestat's concert together (p41-42), but Akasha starts burning vampires in Texas, Baby Jenks's home state ("her sweet little old hometown: Welcome to Gun Barrel City", p48) and their planned meeting place ("Dallas", p40), and thwarts their meeting. Now Baby Jenks is utterly alone in the world. She drives all the way to St. Louis, desperately trying to find community at the coven house there (p49). She does find a 16 year old appearing vampire in St. Louis ("maybe no more than two years older than her when they did it to him" p51), but he is as powerless as she. Once again her luck is shit: Akasha, who she perceives as being "like the Blessed Virgin Mary in the Catholic Church" (p54) aims her destructive fire at them and kills them both.

  
  


****

TQOTD was published September 12, 1988. When considering Baby Jenks, it's necessary to have the historical context of events through 1987, the year before.

1987, October 25. Nationwide media attention spotlights the story of an impoverished black 16 year old who died in St. Louis in 1969. Robert Rayford (February 3, 1953 – May 15, 1969), who had been sick since age 14, presented with AIDS related illnesses including severe lymphadenopathy, wasting syndrome, Kaposi's sarcoma, pneumonia, and systemic chlamydia and widespread HPV infection. In 1987 stored tissue tested positive for HIV antibodies. Doctors thought Rayford's difficult life had likely included childhood sexual abuse and prostitution. He is not thought to have been an injection drug user.

[ https://web.archive.org/web/20181019001732/https://www.chicagotribune.com/news/ct-xpm-1987-10-25-8703200167-story.html ](https://web.archive.org/web/20181019001732/https://www.chicagotribune.com/news/ct-xpm-1987-10-25-8703200167-story.html)

[ http://web.archive.org/web/20170503151316/https://www.nytimes.com/1987/10/28/us/boy-s-1969-death-suggests-aids-invaded-us-several-times.html ](http://web.archive.org/web/20170503151316/https://www.nytimes.com/1987/10/28/us/boy-s-1969-death-suggests-aids-invaded-us-several-times.html)

AIDS among american women and children is closely linked to injection drug use, with sex work being an additional, often related risk. By 1990, of all cases in women in New York State, the mode of transmission to 57% was reported to have been their own drug use and the mode of transmission to 23% was sexual contact with a drug user. The majority of perinatally acquired AIDS cases were children of mothers who injected drugs or had a partner who did.

The HIV/AIDS Epidemic in New York City [https://www.nap.edu/read/1881/chapter/10#257 ](https://www.nap.edu/read/1881/chapter/10#257)

1985\. The nature of the epidemic in NYC injection drug users, with 60% AIDS rate, is studied and interventions to prevent similar disaster elsewhere are recommended. "AIDS among IV Drug Users" [ https://eric.ed.gov/?id=ED274905 ](https://eric.ed.gov/?id=ED274905)

1984, October. New York reports that 61% of AIDS cases are in gay men, with injection drug users accounting for 25% of cases.[ https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/library/national/science/aids/102184sci-aids.html ](https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/library/national/science/aids/102184sci-aids.html)

Those numbers will be dramatically revised by a NYC Health Department study in October 1987 that finds they had severely undercounted the number of AIDS deaths among injection drug users between 1982-86. Deaths among injection drug users had increased threefold in the absence of other factors and the deceased had characteristic AIDS defining illnesses. “Many of these deaths are related and not being recognized as AIDS.” The study showed that in fact 53% of all early AIDS cases in New York were drug acquired.

[ https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/library/national/science/aids/102287sci-aids.html ](https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/library/national/science/aids/102287sci-aids.html)

1984, July 13. US Centers for Disease Control (CDC) reports that avoiding needle-sharing for injection drug use would “be effective in preventing transmission of the virus and of AIDS".

The US right wing government not only did nothing to prevent the spread of HIV via needle-sharing, they actively outlawed programs to provide sterile needles throughout the nation, directly causing tens of thousands of deaths that could have been prevented.

The first needle exchange program was an act of civil disobedience, against laws prohibiting the possession of needles without a prescription. It was founded by a former addict in New Haven, Connecticut in 1986.

[ https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/frontline/article/timeline-30-years-of-aids-in-black-amer ](https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/frontline/article/timeline-30-years-of-aids-in-black-amer)

The first legal needle-exchange program was not allowed until April 1988, in Tacoma, Washington. Then NYC, the epicenter of the epidemic, finally established one and San Francisco followed. In most other locations such harm reduction programs continued to be banned. Western European countries that implemented needle-exchange programs, gave out free syringes, and established opiate-substitution treatment reduced HIV infection to a fraction of the rate in the US.

mid-80's. The cities with highest incidence of AIDS in descending order: New York, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Miami, Newark, Houston, Chicago, Boston, and Washington DC. Retrospective analysis by CDC found that there were 250,000–300,000 people living with HIV in the US in 1983, and the number of people newly exposed between `83-`84 was around 150,000.

1983, January, 7. CDC first confirms heterosexual transmission to women, and transmission occuring prior to a person showing any symptoms of AIDS. “Immunodeficiency among Female Sexual Partners of Males with Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome”.

It will be the 90's before the nature of the epidemic in women is given recognition and serious study.

CDC will revise the case definition of AIDS in 1992, allowing diagnosis, and thus AIDS treatment and assistance, to include any person with HIV infection and a T-cell count of 200 or less. Until then a list of illnesses defining AIDS, long criticized because it did not include many HIV related illnesses common in women, including bacterial pneumonia, pelvic inflammatory disease, tuberculosis and cervical cancer, meant that although suffering, very few women were actually diagnosed with AIDS.

ACT UP 1990 <https://web.archive.org/web/20190216225546/https://actupny.org/documents/cron-90.html>

[ https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/library/national/science/aids/021092sci-aids.html ](https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/library/national/science/aids/021092sci-aids.html)

Just how damaging the horrifically misogynist policy was is highlighted by the new definition resulting in the number of 'official' AIDS cases immediately spiking by 60%. [ https://web.archive.org/web/20170625201753/https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/preview/mmwrhtml/00020374.htm ](https://web.archive.org/web/20170625201753/https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/preview/mmwrhtml/00020374.htm)

Women with HIV found to die faster than men, <https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/library/national/science/aids/122894sci-aids.html>

Reframing Women's Risk: Social Inequalities and HIV Infection <https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/9143725>

1981 In New York, an immunologist treats five black infants with severe immune deficiency syndrome including Pneumocystis pneumonia (PCP), at least three are children of injection drug using sex workers. His diagnosis is initially dismissed by colleagues due to the unfounded idea there is an inherent link between gay men and the new disease. The fate of the five mothers, who could only pass it by having HIV infection themselves, was not recorded. In 1982 the study of the infants submited to the American Academy of Pediatrics will be rejected, delaying recognition of the fact that AIDS had been present, unnoticed and uncared about, in the underclass of NYC for years before middle class white men started dying.

New York Magazine January 12, 1987 [ https://nymag.com/health/features/49240/ ](https://nymag.com/health/features/49240/)

  
  


****

It's easy to guess that Anne picked Texas for Baby Jenks because New York, California, Florida, and Texas were the four states hit hardest early. The structural nature of her character to the theme of AIDS indicates that a injection drug using sex worker was part of the story from inception. Her position at the beginning of the book, making her 14 and sending her to St. Louis to die with a 16 year old boy was clearly last minute gilding on the funeral lily. I don't know why Anne made her a blue eyed blonde (p14). I do know that I'm not going to be picky about it, as there is a much larger issue: she chose Baby Jenks, a nobody who never had the slightest chance, abused by everyone, guilty of literally every sin that the catholic church condemns people for, as the only soul in the Vampire Chronicles to experience a welcome into christian Anne's heaven when she died ("she was dead ... passing through this murky lair of sad lingering people. She was on her way! ... The light was shining again, the magnificent light she'd glimpsed when she'd almost died that first time around. She moved towards it, into it. And this was truly beautiful. Never had she seen such colors, such radiance, never had she heard the pure music that she was hearing now. There were no words to describe this; it was beyond any language she'd ever known ... one coming towards her, to take her and to help her --it was her mother! ... Never had she felt such love as she felt for her mother; but then love surrounded her; the light, the color, the love --these things were utterly indistinguishable ... She wasn't Baby Jenks now. No, not at all." p54). Mater dreamed a crazy dream, like her Nicolas, of justice. Regardless of what she may have mucked up, I will always credit her for that.

The majority of the injection drug users and sex workers who lost their lives early in the crisis and get overlooked so often, then as well as now, were people of color. They were suffering and dying before 1981, when the 'official' epidemic began. In the late 70's they blamed illnesses called 'the dwindles', 'junkie pneumonia', and 'Rikers Island adenopathy', conditions that are retrospectively diagnosed as AIDS related. This stigmatized population faced poor access to the american for-profit, misogynist, racist health care system, no community to support them and little ability to advocate for themselves.

Sex workers remain criminalized, marginalized and abused. Decriminalizing sex work would stop 33% of new HIV infections.

[https://www.afao.org.au/article/decriminalisation-sex-work-evidence/ ](https://www.afao.org.au/article/decriminalisation-sex-work-evidence/)

[ https://www.thelancet.com/series/hiv-and-sex-workers ](https://www.thelancet.com/series/hiv-and-sex-workers)

In 2001, Portugal, with the highest rate of drug acquired HIV in the EU, decriminalized personal drug possession. As of 2018 HIV infection among drug users in Portugal was reduced by 50%. Further, without the reservoir created by infection among users and in a climate where punitive stigma has been lessened, in the general population of Portugal the HIV rate fell from 104 cases per million in 1999 to 4.2 cases per million in 2015.

[ https://web.archive.org/web/20200113092920/https://www.nydailynews.com/news/world/ny-portugal-decriminalization-drugs-hiv-rate-declined-20190506-zi7ryagwk5b3nejuurh37cw6ri-story.html ](https://web.archive.org/web/20200113092920/https://www.nydailynews.com/news/world/ny-portugal-decriminalization-drugs-hiv-rate-declined-20190506-zi7ryagwk5b3nejuurh37cw6ri-story.html)

[https://www.opensocietyfoundations.org/publications/war-drugs-and-HIVAIDS-how-criminalization-drug-use-fuels-global-pandemic ](https://www.opensocietyfoundations.org/publications/war-drugs-and-HIVAIDS-how-criminalization-drug-use-fuels-global-pandemic)

The overwhelming, demonstrable effect of 'moral' persecution of other people's indulgence is infliction of misery and death. It was true in The Story of The Twins. It's always been true. It always will be.


	3. Contextualizing Daniel Molloy

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> My name is Daniel and I'm an alcoholic, or The Boy with the Amulet of Blood Transmissible _Immortality_.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> TQOTD page references are to  
“The Queen of the Damned.” by Anne Rice. 1988, Alfred A. Knopf. Hardbound, 448 pages. ISBN 0-394-55823-5.  


Unlike Jesse, who has tremendous support from a sprawling family and the close Talamasca community, Daniel is a loner. But he has a survival advantage Baby Jenks doesn't: a lover who is devoted to him and willing to take risks to care for him. (Armand chasing across Europe and the US for days while a mysterious force incinerates other vampires all around him to get to him (p96), Shielding him with his own body during Akasha's attack at the Cow Palace (p214), Gathering Daniel and Louis into his arms in what he thought was his dying act (p416)).

Circa 1978-1979 Armand and Daniel settle in New York City. Date based on: after meeting in 1973 ("twelve years ago" p76, 1985 -12 =1973) Daniel and Armand become lovers "four years" later, after Daniel had spent "a long quiet summer" alone (p83), so August, 1977. ("_Lovers._ Yes, it had become an ecstatic and engulfing affair" p86.) They spend a short time in "London" (p86), then a much longer time "in New York" (p87-90), "in Manhattan" (p88) "in SoHo and Greenwich Village" (p87).

Almost nobody, especially not men having sex with men, used condoms in the 70's and early 80's. As a sexualy active bi guy (“Men and women fell in love with Armand, of course … And it was Daniel who must bed these” p86) living in NYC, the epicenter of the epidemic, it's simple statistics that Daniel is just as likely to have been exposed to HIV as not.

By the mid-80's it was thought that the average time between exposure and diagnosis of AIDS could be 5-10 years, and it was well known that having no symptoms during that time was common. Daniel shows no sign of AIDS related illness (no, people so ill they were within days of AIDS related death were not solo traveling 4 countries in 7 days (p68), that's silly, they weren't able to stand up and walk across the room on their own steam). But Daniel would have known that he was likely exposed, and reacted with exactly the new desperation for Armand to bring him over immediately, his crash from functional into end stage alcoholism, and the resulting breakdown of his relationship with Armand the text shows as perfectly timed: an anchoring date of The Devil's Minion chapter is the June 1982 release of Blade Runner (p87), toward the end of their time in NYC: precisely when the discovery that AIDS was sexuallly transmitted hit the media and terror came down on the gay community like a hammer.

After June, 1982. Armand implements a plan to rapidly ("Daniel had been dazzled by the speed with which things happened" p90) adventure up a fortune with Daniel and they leave NYC for a new way of life (“they purchased a mansion in Florida” p90). That HIV/AIDS had a latency period was not known before 1983, much less that that period could be a decade or longer. Date based on: They were still in NYC when Armand became obsessed with "Blade Runner" (p87, released June 1982) and "Time Bandits" (released November 1981). Supported by: after becoming lovers with Armand, "Daniel didn't see high noon for five years" (p88). August 1977 +5 years = late 1982. i.e. Daniel began being awake at noon because he was working the daytime side of their wealth building. (“It had begun with a treasure find in the waters off Jamaica, Armand chartering a boat to show Daniel where salvage operations must begin” p77).

1983-1985. In Florida, Daniel and Armand have terrible, "ugly fights" over his refusal to make Daniel immortal (p94) and Daniel repeatedly walks out on Armand (“and the wandering started" "Armand would see Daniel leave time and again" p94, "for months" at a time p75). Date based on: after becoming lovers with Armand, "Daniel didn't see high noon for five years" (p88). This 100% nocturnal existence indicates that Daniel never separated from Armand during the first 5 years.

Another anchoring date in TDM indicates that although Daniel was frightened, he was not ill. Daniel's final, "and this time it was supposed to be for good" walkout occurred "six months" before (p70-71) Lestat's concert, = May 1985. The precision of that date is no more an accident on Anne's part than tying Armand and Daniel's sudden abandonment of NYC for Florida to the months after Blade Runner was released. If he had no symptoms, Daniel's chance to find out if he really had been exposed to the AIDS virus aligns perfectly with that anchor date: the first US clinics offering ELISA tests to individuals started in May 1985. If Daniel had already been actively sick, 'May 1985' would have had no significance to him whatsoever.

So did Daniel test, before or after that last fight where he accused Armand of planning to watch him die (p75)? Flip a coin, I guess. The evidence in the text only indicates the timing of the fight. The awful thing is, in 1985, it was thought that perhaps only 20% of symptomless people who tested positive for antibodies would develop AIDS. It was well understood that AIDS was caused by HIV, but because of the lengthy (estimated average: 8 years) latency period, in 1985 it had simply not been studied long enough to discover that HIV, unlike other viral illnesses, cannot be defeated by the immune system and always eventually progresses to AIDS. Even when Anne was finishing the book, the best medical wisdom could offer on the prognosis of a positive antibody test was "20 to 30% of HIV carriers will develop AIDS within five years." Even the pessimistic guess of most researchers was 50% of those with HIV antibodies would ultimately develop AIDS.

New York Times, 1987, "Fact, Theory and Myth on the Spread of AIDS" <https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/library/national/science/aids/021587sci-aids.html>

New York Times, 1986, "AIDS in the Future" <https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/library/national/science/aids/011486sci-aids.html>

Testing would have left a symptomless Daniel just as uncertain and frightened as not testing, because we know, thematically, it couldn't have come back negative. Daniel's fearful uncertainty is structural to his story in TDM.

****

Historical context

1981, June 5. CDC publishes an article on cases of rare lung infection, pneumocystis pneumonia (PCP), in five young, white, previously healthy gay men in Los Angeles. June 5, the same day, a New York dermatologist reports to CDC a cluster of 26 cases of rare and unusually aggressive Kaposi’s sarcoma (KS) among gay men in New York and California. June 5-6: The Associated Press, Los Angeles Times, and San Francisco Chronicle report on the article. Within days, CDC receives reports from around the nation of similar cases of PCP, KS, and other infections associated with a weakened immune system among gay men. The cause of the syndrome, and why it appears only gay men develop this immunodeficiency is completley unknown.

[ https://web.archive.org/web/20120112041503/https://www.nytimes.com/1981/07/03/us/rare-cancer-seen-in-41-homosexuals.html ](https://web.archive.org/web/20120112041503/https://www.nytimes.com/1981/07/03/us/rare-cancer-seen-in-41-homosexuals.html)

1981, August 29. <https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/library/national/science/aids/082981sci-aids.html>

1982, summer. Media attention on AIDS in the gay community. The new illness is deadly and has been determined to be contagious. By end of July 1982, 452 cases and 177 deaths were recorded by CDC.

[ https://www.nytimes.com/1982/05/11/science/new-homosexual-disorder-worries-health-officials.html ](https://www.nytimes.com/1982/05/11/science/new-homosexual-disorder-worries-health-officials.html)

1982, May. Gay Men’s Health Crisis (GMHC), the first community-based AIDS service provider in the US, founded in NYC that January, starts an information and counseling hotline on a volunteer's home phone- he receives 100 phone calls from worried gay men the first night.

1982, May 31. The first front-page story on AIDS in the mainstream press “Mysterious Fever Now an Epidemic.” Los Angeles Times.

1982, June 12. CBS News reports on the spread of new immune deficiency syndrome first seen in gay men in New York, San Francisco and Los Angeles.

1982, June 17. NBC News, leading off with the homophobic quote: "The lifestyles of some male homosexuals has triggered an epidemic." reports on the new CDC findings in a cluster of cases in gay men in Southern California that suggest that the unknown ‘infectious agent’ thought to cause AIDS is sexually transmitted. [https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=1LKJ5ZzzL0w ](https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=1LKJ5ZzzL0w)

[ https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/preview/mmwrhtml/00001114.htm ](https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/preview/mmwrhtml/00001114.htm)

The Washington Blade, June 25, 1982. [ https://digdc.dclibrary.org/islandora/object/dcplislandora%3A10411#page/3/mode/1up ](https://digdc.dclibrary.org/islandora/object/dcplislandora%3A10411#page/3/mode/1up)

1982, June 25. The film Blade Runner is released.

[ https://web.archive.org/web/20170429135646/https://www.nytimes.com/1982/08/08/nyregion/a-disease-s-spread-provokes-anxiety.html ](https://web.archive.org/web/20170429135646/https://www.nytimes.com/1982/08/08/nyregion/a-disease-s-spread-provokes-anxiety.html)

1983, February 6. The New York Times reports the first understanding of an HIV/AIDS latency period: "The incubation period for AIDS is thought to be at least six to eight months and could be as long as two years. This means that people who have already been infected might not know ... might have unknowingly infected hundreds more individuals"

[ https://www.nytimes.com/1983/02/06/magazine/aids-a-new-disease-s-deadly-odyssey.html ](https://www.nytimes.com/1983/02/06/magazine/aids-a-new-disease-s-deadly-odyssey.html)

1983, spring. For the first time, people are told that condoms help prevent transmission of AIDS: The New York Times Magazine reports doctors recommending condom use for anal sex in February. In May, the pamphlet "How to Have Sex in an Epidemic: One Approach", advising condoms, is widely distributed by gay men’s organizations in NYC (Scan <https://web.archive.org/web/20190701033304/https://richardberkowitz.com/category/4-how-to-have-sex-in-an-epidemic/> ) In June, San Francisco AIDS & KS Foundation gave out free condoms at Pride.

The advice to use condoms is based on logic: it's known they prevent sexual transmission of hepatitis, and the pattern of AIDS spread is similar. After antibiotic treatment provided a cure for syphilis and gonorrhea in the 1940's, condoms had been considered contraceptives. Estimates are less than 1% of men sexually active with men in NYC used condoms in the 1970's.

Government prevention advice, on the other hand consists soley of 'dont have sex with people with AIDS’. CDC: “Current Trends Prevention of Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome (AIDS): Report of Inter-Agency Recommendations.” 4 March 1983.

The advent of safe sex in urban gay communities occured too late for many: retrospective estimates are that 50% of all men sexually active with men in New York City and San Francisco had been exposed by 1983.

France, David. How to Survive a Plague: The Inside Story of How Citizens and Science Tamed AIDS, 2015. [ISBN 978-0307700636](https://www.amazon.com/How-Survive-Plague-Citizens-Science/dp/0307700631)

1983\. New York had the most reported AIDS cases of any city, 42% of all people diagnosed in the US.

1983\. By the end of 1983, CDC recorded 3,064 AIDS cases and 1,298 deaths.

1984\. By the end of 1984, CDC recorded 7,699 AIDS cases and 3,665 deaths.

[ https://www.cdc.gov/hiv/library/reports/hiv-surveillance-archive.html ](https://www.cdc.gov/hiv/library/reports/hiv-surveillance-archive.html)

1985, May. Use of the first AIDS antibody test, ELISA, is started to screen individuals. The test had been approved by FDA in March, and use to screen donated blood began in April. The test had a high rate of false positives and so when used for individuals it required three positive tests to confirm antibodies were present, and even then it was not considered diagnostic in the absence of AIDS defining symptoms. Many doctors and gay advocacy organizations recommended men without symptoms avoid the tests.

The Washington Blade, May 24,1985. <https://digdc.dclibrary.org/islandora/object/dcplislandora%3A10612#page/1/mode/1up>

The Washington Blade, April 26,1985. [ https://digdc.dclibrary.org/islandora/object/dcplislandora%3A10450#page/9/mode/1up ](https://digdc.dclibrary.org/islandora/object/dcplislandora%3A10450#page/9/mode/1up)

[ https://web.archive.org/web/20171127222547/https://www.nytimes.com/1985/03/10/nyregion/tests-for-suspected-aids-antibody-begin-in-april.html ](https://web.archive.org/web/20171127222547/https://www.nytimes.com/1985/03/10/nyregion/tests-for-suspected-aids-antibody-begin-in-april.html)

****

Daniel is alcoholic. We get all of 240 words into TDM before he mentions needing a drink. This is consistent characterization from IWTV, where at age 20, he was already the kind of drinker that carries a flask around in his jacket pocket. ("Why don't you drink from that bottle in your pocket?" asked the vampire ... The boy shrugged, smiling now; and he took the small flask out of his jacket pocket, unscrewing the gold cap, and took a sip." Interview with the Vampire, by Anne Rice. Alfred A. Knopf, Hardbound. In the 1976 edition (340 pages) it's p125. In the 1992 reset edition (274 pages) it's p101.)

Daniel being drunk is not mentioned in the Italy, London or New York sections, but early on in the 12 years TDM covers, Daniel is described as getting "drunk as fast as he could" (p81) when Armand trolls him in the dining room of the Copley Hotel when "Interview with the Vampire" is published (specified to be "in 1976" in universe, p11, the year before they become lovers). Being jailed for public drunkenness (p82), and being drunk and 'sleeping' in a movie theatre (p81).

Daniel’s walkouts involve severe benders ("the escaping" p94, "periods of madness" p75). During which he suffers textbook extended alcoholic blackouts ("disintegration. He'd realize he had not moved from his chair in five hours ... he'd wake suddenly in a stale and unchanged bed, frightened, unable to remember the name of the city where he was, or where he'd been for days before ... unshaven face, soiled clothes" p75).

On the last day of his mortal life, Daniel is described as wandering the street ("Chicago, Michigan Avenue" p73) in the cold all day, thinking that he has to have some alcohol ("needed something, a drink at least" "he could sell it, maybe get enough for a glass of brandy" p68) but not obtaining any.

His cognitive functioning is confused, and he's experiencing anxiety. He is "shivering, sweating" (p73), and agitated. He also has significant memory deficits ("Hard to remember everything" p68, "He had trouble remembering" p99), he's "talking to himself" (p71) "murmuring aloud to himself" (p67), and described as "weak, delirious", shuffling (p68), and almost falling (p95). He's in such a state it attracts attention ("People turned to look at him" p71). He's experiencing derealization ("Nothing here seemed particularly real to him" p69), and is profoundly apathetic ("He didn't give a damn about the check, really. He couldn't imagine pressing the buttons of a phone" p69), incompetent of even the survival-level self care of atempting to panhandle ("would anybody on this street lend him a quarter? ... Probably not" p69). All he can manage is mentally calling out to Armand for rescue. He is also described as having traveled four countries in the last week, ("Last Sunday he had been in Paris, and the Friday before that in Edinburgh. Before Edinburgh, he had been in Stockholm" p68 (October 30, 1985 was a Wednesday)), indicating that whatever has compromised his functioning, it's happened since he arrived in Chicago.

This description indicates that Daniel is suffering alcoholic-related dementia, specifically Wernicke encephalopathy, which typically presents with sudden onset, and this has caused him to allow his alcohol-dependent body to go into withdrawal; i.e. alcoholism has physically damaged Daniel's brain, compromising his ability to get alcohol for himself to prevent withdrawal sickness or to seek treatment. 

He is not experiencing delirium tremens, as DT's have different symptoms, he's not reached that stage of withdrawal yet (DT's can begin at any time between 24-72 hours without a drink). It's specified that the longest he can have been without alcohol is "Thirty-six" hours. (p68). The chain of events began when "his wallet had somehow disappeared day before yesterday" (p69). It's implied that after that he was unable to manage obtaining more food or alcohol ("nothing in the refrigerator of his small dirty hotel room" p68). By this morning his functioning was so poor he was locked out of his hotel "because he had not paid the rent" (p68) despite having a check in his pocket ("no money, only an old crumpled royalty check" that he has been carrying since he was "in Vienna" p68, implied to be weeks ago) that would have provided the money, and his passport (p71) to use as identification to cash it being right there at the hotel.

Subtextually Daniel, like Baby Jenks and Jesse, has been exposed to HIV. But the text is clear that it's his alcoholism that has put him at death's door. (Daniel: a decanter. Bourbon. He wanted it. But he was too exhausted to move. Armand: “You're dying ... you weigh no more than a hundred and thirty pounds now. And the alcohol is eating at your insides. You are half mad … if you go on as you are, you won’t live another five days.” Daniel: unbearable thought, actually. But if that's so, then why have I been running away? "I'm dying ... I would like to have the Bourbon now.” Armand: "There is nothing I can do to make you want to live, isn't that so?" Daniel: "Not that again. I will jump out of the plane if you go on." p98-99.)

Cirrhosis is only one of several causes of premature death in severe chronic alcoholics. Heart events, strokes, and Gastro-Intestinal hemorrhage also happen because of organ damage. People with severe chronic alcohol dependence also suffer withdrawal death (15%) by stopping alcohol without medical help.

Yes, being that thin is a classic symptom of end stage alcoholism. Severe chronic alcoholics are always malnourished and often physically wasted because they don't consume much but alcohol, and they cannot properly absorb what nutrition they do take. Some of Daniel's symptoms: dementia, wasting, do overlap with death from AIDS-related illnesses, but HIV-associated neurocognitive disorders typically present with gradual onset. Daniel shows no hint of any of the invasive, disabling, fungal, parasitical, bacterial and viral infections and cancers that define AIDS, and everything he is experiencing, including the sudden onset of his symptoms, fits perfectly with Wernicke encephalopathy and alcohol withdrawal.

The precise wording Rice uses is important. Armand: "There is nothing I can do to make you want to live, isn't that so?" and Daniel replies: "Not that again" (p99). This exchange would be nonsensical if death was near due to AIDS-related illness. It only makes sense if they are both perfectly aware that Daniel's health situation is due to alcoholism and the psychology of his desire not to live if he can't be immortal; he's calling Daniel out on destroying himself.

The obvious question about this scene where Armand and Daniel discuss his imminent death is 'How does Armand know Daniel is going to die within 5 days?' The answer is simple, although obscure: the phase of alcohol withdrawal that can be fatal occurs at 3-5 days without a drink. Armand knows this just as anyone who has been in the sad position of loving a severe chronic alcoholic does. Alcohol is one of the most dangerous drugs from which to withdraw, and stopping withdrawal is the reason that the first thing Armand does when he gets to Daniel, who has had nothing for "Thirty-six" hours (p68), is help him drink "a tumbler half full of brandy" "He lifted the brandy to Daniel's lips" (p96).

Armand: "If you go on as you are, you won't live another five days." (p99) He's not guessing, nor saying 'I am mystically-prognosticating: you are destined to die on 'blank' date and nothing can save you'. Armand's a vampire. He can hear Daniel's struggling heart (it frightens him during one of their fights, p75). He's informing Daniel that withdrawal is too much for his alcohol damaged body and will certainly be fatal. 

****

The Amulet. Protective blood transmissible immortality. In the world Anne made, 'the boy' will never suffer AIDS and die, he'll live forever. A gift of hope by inverting the meaning of 'infected blood'. Predictably, a blood vial necklace started being a popular goth accessory in 1989.

Mostly the theme of AIDS in TQOTD is subtle, built with just enough detail to be recognisable, a delicate lattice that underpins the story without being compulsory for surface enjoyment of the book.

That subtlety is abandoned in the Armand/Daniel thread. The equation of 'blood' with 'sex', an unbelievably startling new idea at the begining of the AIDS crisis, is structural to TDM. 'AIDS is caused by a virus spread by sex or exchanges of blood, such as sharing syringes.' In the mid-80's, every news article on the subject included those words. It was not subtle when Rice first introduced the idea of vampire/human lovers into VampChron: "Even before the blood exchange, Armand had pursued Daniel" (p76), "another embrace, another small exchange of blood" (p85). Daniel's orgasms are rendered in metaphor; "dying together. _Together._ Daniel had clung to Armand." (p85), "fine soundless throbbing. The light of the lamps expanded, brightened, obliterated the room" (p86), "he closed his eyes, his body heating slowly, only to burn truly" (p89), but the message that these exchanges of blood are sexual for the human and erotic for the vampire comes through unambiguously.

Daniel's amulet, likewise, was never intended to be subtle. The 21st century term 'fluid bonding' wasn't used in the 80's of course, but AIDS is why the concept exists. These two men are lovers, presented warts and all in their messy romance, deserving of their happy ending, humanized, if you will, to a huge, mostly straight, mainstream audience in a time when brutally dehumanizing homophobia was the rule and equation of 'gay' with 'death' loomed large. Anne did this, in a time when literally no one else did. That's worth remembering. Daniel's lovingly protective necklace full of queer, infected-with-_immortality _blood is a gold locket shaped cold iron anvil.

Anne was a master of that, stomping all over the line between what is metaphor and what is literal, the line between what is text and what is subtext, stacking layers of meaning with every technique possible, and loading in as much purposeful polysemy as her prose could hold. I think fans who have come to the series in more recent times, after subtext started being used as a weapon against audiences, second guess 'but did she mean it like that?' about what they percevie in her books. Anne is 78 now, she's had a long time to say stupid things about her work. Other people have had a long time to pick at flaws and graft theories about her work. At the time, Anne poured her heart into these books. She was very, very sincere. The text is sincere and self evident. Listen to the text. Take the text at its word. Always, regardless if what it is saying is beautiful, awful, or six things at once, it was indeed meant like that.


	4. Contextualizing Jesse Reeves

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The story of Jesse, medically acquired HIV, and genocide in the human family.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> page references are to  
“The Queen of the Damned.” by Anne Rice. 1988, Alfred A. Knopf. Hardbound, 448 pages. ISBN 0-394-55823-5.  


If one has not read The Vampire Lestat and so knows that Lestat's concert takes place in 1985, the timeline for Jesse Reeves is evidence within TQOTD itself for it taking place in 1985. At the time of Lestat's concert Jesse has been in the Talamasca “twelve years” (p127). She was sent to New Orleans in “1981” (p157), at the end of her “eighth year" (p157). 12-8=4 years, 1981+4= 1985. After New Orleans Jesse was sent to India, where she had spent the last “four years” (p173), before returning to the US just weeks before the concert =1985.

Jesse is the third and final mortal character in TQOTD. Like "thirty-two" year old Daniel (p67), she is a child of the 1950's. At "thirty-five" (p126), she is the eldest and she has had life long privilege of highest socio-economic status. But there is so much that Jesse doesn't know, and is desperate to find out. She does not know she has the AIDS virus.

Like Daniel, Jesse shows no sign of having developed full blown AIDS in her story. Daniel's themes are fear and love: it's AIDS terror that destroys him, love that saves him. Jesse's themes are ignorance and investigation; ignorance costs her her mortal life, but she saves herself by finding answers that were hidden from her; Investigation results in an immortal life.

Jesse is different than her neighbors, she is a member of a sprawling worldwide 'Great Family' with a unique heritage (p137). Her hereditary abilities have brought her to the attention of both the Talamasca (p149) and the vampire Maharet; the ancient, secret progenitor of the Great Family, who keeps the truth of Jesse's experiences with vampires from her (_"You will forget this. You will remember nothing."_ p146).

Unlike Baby Jenks and Daniel, who both fit the profile of those at risk of AIDS in literal ways, Jesse's risk is metaphorical. It has to be because it falls to her to represent several groups. The matrilineal ("the thread became matrilineal as it has always been since" p388) great family is somewhat reminiscent of the worldwide family of Judaism, the unforgotten victims of 20th century fascism's viley evil idea to make the world a 'better' place by removing 'the wrong people' from it. Her hereditary psychic abilities ("our family over the generations has contained many a seer of spirits ... It would seem the genes travel together" p137-138), are symbolic of hereditary hemophilia, because that is what puts her at risk, and that risk was present at birth; a fact highlighted by Maharet claiming her as an infant (p134). Finally, when Mael gives her Blood in a hospital (p209) she also becomes symbolic of those exposed to HIV via blood transfusion.

Hemophilia is a condition that prevents blood clotting. In 1960 the life expectancy for a person with severe hemophilia was less than 40 years. By the 70's treatments including AHF Factor VIII saved and extended the lives of people suffering from it.

Doses of AHF Factor VIII were made by mixing together many thousands of individual donations of human blood plasma. It was produced for profit by various pharmaceutical corporations.

The truth is as simple as it is awful: For several years in the 80's, some of those corporations knowingly sold HIV contaminated AHF Factor VIII, an utterly indefensible act as another, less profitable, clotting medicine was available. The result was one of the worst drug-related medical disasters in history: about 10,000 US hemophiliacs and thousands more worldwide were exposed. (New York Times, "Hit Hard by the AIDS Virus, Hemophiliacs Angrily Speak Out".)

It's estimated that another 12,000 americans were exposed to HIV via blood transfusion before ELISA test screening of the blood supply was implemented in 1985.

Jesse, the only character in TQOTD shown in a hospital setting, is described in one three times, each visit also involving vampires. At the time of her birth the good intentions and results of medics are emphasised ("She had no name for two weeks as she languished in the county hospital, condemned for hours to the sterility and coldness of machines; but the nurses had adored her, nicknaming her "the sparrow," and cuddling her and singing to her whenever allowed. Years later they were to write to her, sending along the snapshots they'd taken, telling her little stories, which had greatly amplified her early sense of having been loved. It was Maharet who at last came for her" p134).

Jesse's subsequent hospital visits are both related to a certain air of menace and each represents a medical exposure to HIV. The first occurs in "the summer of 1981" (p157), when she is treated for an unexplained, lingering ailment ("in Baton Rouge" p164, where her hotel was), after being haunted by Claudia's ghost in New Orleans. ("She was sick by the time she reached the hotel" p170, "In the hospital they gave her antibiotics, sedatives, enough dope to drive anyone to insanity ... She was still sick when she got on the plane for London … She was sick for weeks" p171.) The second occurs after she suffers head and neck injury at Lestat's San Francisco concert. ("you're in the hospital and we are doing everything we can" p208, "Yet now she could taste it, the warm fluid flowing into her mouth … _What is it? What are you giving me? I don't want to go under. Sleep, my beloved. I don't want to. I want to feel it when I die. I want to know!_ But the fluid was filling her mouth, and she was swallowing" p209).

Like Jesse, the hemophiliacs did not know, they thought they were safe because they were lied to. The transfusion cases are a different issue. Unlike AHF Factor VIII, medics involved in blood transfusions were not coldly selling people their own death, disguised as 'medicine' for profit. Blood transfusions saved lives, just as Mael saved Jesse. That some of those lives were later lost to AIDS was largely shitty luck. Microbes are like that, ignorance of effective measures to protect from them and the bad luck to encounter them will bite you in the ass, but it's not a matter of malice. People are the ones that can choose to act with malice.

By any normal standards 20,000 dead would be mind numbing. In the scale of the AIDS crisis, that killed over 400,000 young americans in the 80's and 90's, people who died from medically acquired HIV are only a fraction. They are missed and should never be forgotten.

****

Historical context

1941-1945. The Holocaust. World War II genocide across German-occupied Europe, Nazi Germany and its collaborators systematically murdered some six million Jews, around two-thirds of their European population.

1982, July. CDC publishes “Epidemiologic Notes and Reports Pneumocystis carinii Pneumonia among Persons with Hemophilia A.” the first report of immunosuppression in patients with hemophilia with no other risk factors for AIDS. Two of the three patients profiled in the report have already died by the time of publication. It will be later publicized that hemophiliacs had been dying from retrospectively recognized AIDS related illness as early as 1979.

1982, December. Panic over the safety of the US blood supply after media reports on a 20-month-old San Francisco infant's death from AIDS. He had required multiple transfusions at birth, and donor tracing revealed one of the blood donors had died of AIDS. ("Possible Transfusion-Associated Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome -CDC”) At least two other possible cases of AIDS in blood transfusion recipients and multiple cases in hemophiliacs are under investigation.

[ https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/1982/12/10/immune-disease-linked-to-blood-in-transfusion/666c9c4a-28fb-46fb-b792-e2d547333cb8/ ](https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/1982/12/10/immune-disease-linked-to-blood-in-transfusion/666c9c4a-28fb-46fb-b792-e2d547333cb8/)

[ https://www.nytimes.com/1982/12/10/us/infant-who-received-transfusion-dies-of-immune-deficiency-illness.html ](https://www.nytimes.com/1982/12/10/us/infant-who-received-transfusion-dies-of-immune-deficiency-illness.html)

ABC News Nightline, December 17, 1982. [ https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=5FREjnYV_aM ](https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=5FREjnYV_aM)

1983, January. Bayer's Cutter division, the largest of the pharma corporations selling clotting factors, acknowledged that "There is strong evidence to suggest that AIDS is passed on to other people through ... plasma products." Nevertheless, the corporation kept selling the unsafe 'medicine'.

1983, March 4. CDC confirms that the unknown agent that causes AIDS is blood transmissible. The report recommends people at risk of AIDS be discouraged from donating blood. (CDC: “Prevention of Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome (AIDS): Report of Inter-Agency Recommendations.”) On March 24, the FDA issues emergency 'interim' rules on men donating blood: If they had had sex with a man at any time since 1977, they would be prohibited from donating blood indefinitely. The “lifetime ban” policy will later be made permanent and not be modified, despite the introduction of individual HIV testing, until 2015.

The Washington Blade, March 4, 1983 [ https://digdc.dclibrary.org/islandora/object/dcplislandora%3A10616#page/1/mode/1up ](https://digdc.dclibrary.org/islandora/object/dcplislandora%3A10616#page/1/mode/1up)

1983, March. CDC acknowledged that blood products "appear responsible for AIDS among hemophilia patients." Nevertheless, the government did not prevent the corporations from selling the unsafe 'medicine'.

1983, August. Bayer's Cutter division secret documents forecast a “gigantic epidemic" among hemophiliacs. Nevertheless, they continued selling the deadly 'medicine' in the US until February 1984. Cutter was later found liable for breaking federal law by recruiting high-risk prisoners, injection drug users, and gay men as plasma donors.

1984, February. Bayer Cutter introduced a safer, heat-treated version of AHF Factor VIII in the US and Europe. To prevent loss to their profit margin the corporation continued to sell deadly contaminated blood products to Asia and Latin America until July 1985.

[ https://ahrp.org/bayer-documents-aids-tainted-blood-killed-thousands-of-hemophiliacs/ ](https://ahrp.org/bayer-documents-aids-tainted-blood-killed-thousands-of-hemophiliacs/)

1985, March. The first AIDS antibody test, ELISA, is approved by FDA, allowing US blood supply screening to begin. On August 1, the New York Times reported the US blood supply had been declared free of AIDS, making HIV transmission by transfusion rare.

1985, August. Ryan White (December 6, 1971 – April 8, 1990) National media attention on 14 year old hemophiliac suffering AIDS stigma and discrimination. Misinformation that AIDS can be spread by routine casual contact, such as shaking hands, is common. White became an important activist educating the public.

1987, March. Hemophiliacs Sue Bayer

[ http://web.archive.org/web/20171103202333/https://www.nytimes.com/1987/03/18/business/bayer-named-in-aids-suit.html ](http://web.archive.org/web/20171103202333/https://www.nytimes.com/1987/03/18/business/bayer-named-in-aids-suit.html)

1987, April 29. FDA approves the Western Blot test kit, the first test efficient enough for effective screening of individuals. CDC recommends that people who received blood transfusions between 1978 and 1985 should consider being tested. They estimate that of 30 million people who had blood transfusion in those years, about 12,000 acquired HIV, with risk being highest in areas where the epidemic was most pervasive: New York, California, Florida, Washington, D.C. and Texas, the more transfusions received, and the closer in date to April, 1985.

[ https://web.archive.org/web/20200304045024/https://www.chicagotribune.com/news/ct-xpm-1987-04-14-8701280407-story.html ](https://web.archive.org/web/20200304045024/https://www.chicagotribune.com/news/ct-xpm-1987-04-14-8701280407-story.html)

[ https://web.archive.org/web/20200304044503/https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1987-10-18-mn-15096-story.html ](https://web.archive.org/web/20200304044503/https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1987-10-18-mn-15096-story.html)

****

How many people made up Maharet's small tribe? Maybe less than a thousand ("hundreds had come to visit, both from our village and all the surrounding villages" p293). Akasha wipes the culture from the face of the earth ("we saw all the men and women of our tribe laying dead, and we knew their bodies would be left there for the beasts and the earth to consume ... What is one small nation of villages? What is one people ... A thousand such peoples are buried. And so our people are buried to this day" p296) because she finds their victimless practices disgusting. And because denying these people their right to exist benefits her social engineering agenda.

Can't forget that, of course. Always persecution and murders are committed because the aggressor sees benefit to himself in the act.

At one point Lestat, who knows nothing of Akasha's history, is sickened by the mass murder she has instigated in Haiti and wanders to the ruins of a plantation to think about the genocide perpetrated by europeans against the natives ("to think, they had brought such death to it, the natives gone within a few short years, destroyed by slavery, disease, and endless cruelty" p357). Akasha's annihilation of Maharet's tribe was a small act of genocide. Perhaps more directly comparable to the actions of european-americans destroying small amerindian groups in the west in the 1800's than to Columbus and his successors forcing hundreds of thousands of Taíno to work to death in gold mines in the 1500's. Both examples provide close up, granular views, and it's not at all difficult to zoom out to the big picture and remember that the slaughter on Hispaniola and massacres and smallpox infected 'gift' blankets in the west were both small parts of the largest genocide ever perpetrated within the human family; a centuries long effort that, in concert with the shitty luck to not have defenses against particular microbes, annihilated 90% of the human population of two continents.


	5. Contextualizing The Queen of the Damned

There are three distinct things to consider when looking at TQOTD in relation to the AIDS crisis. First, the book utilizes the framing device from TVL: the stories it tells are framed by events surrounding Lestat's Halloween 1985 concert. For the characters this means nothing that happened after that date in universe had any effect on their stories in TQOTD. Second, the book was published in September 1988, and events in real life up to the last months of 1987 shaped its creation. Third, events that occurred before it was published and through the early 90's heavily influenced how the book, which was a best seller on the New York Times list from October 1988 to February 1989, was received.

****

1973, June 24. At The UpStairs Lounge, a gay bar in the French Quarter of New Orleans, a horrific arson fire kills 32 people. 15 were terribly injured and those who managed to escape witnessed helplessly as friends and lovers burned to death before their eyes. Police found bodies fused together, dead in each other's arms. Three bodies were never identified. Some identified bodies went unclaimed by relatives. Survivors lost their jobs because the tragedy outed them. New Orleans Catholic, Lutheran, and Baptist churches refused to allow survivors to hold a memorial service for the victims on their premises. 'Jokes' were told about the deceased. Investigation languished and no one was ever charged. Not a single political nor any religious leader offered condolences.

Subtext subtly communicates story by utilizing shared frame of reference between author and audience. That reference may be very wide and speak to most readers or very narrow and speak to only some; interpretation of what is being implied is always dependent on prior knowledge. The mass murder at the UpStairs Lounge is a well known event now. Not so in the 80's. Basically two groups of people knew of it then: people from New Orleans old enough to remember it and members of the Metropolitan Community Church and other LGBT activists.

Daniel's All Hallow's Eve account of surviving the killing ground of the Cow Palace parking lot, that starts with him simply screaming "FIRE!" is the climax of the first half of the book (p213). It has been shaped as an allegory for the way the AIDS crisis was experienced in the gay community: people all around just suddenly sickened and died, some just seeming to disappear. No one knew why some were struck and not others, no one knew if they would be next. The community was decimated, and surviving it was a matter of dumb luck.

The UpStairs Lounge was the inspiration. That tragedy and its parallels to the horrifically more costly tragedy of the early AIDS crisis are literally at the center of the book. One can almost imagine the pieces slotting together, growing into a sprawling web in her mind as Anne witnessed suffering, death and the same cruel reaction happening all over again, every single day in person in San Francisco and omnipresent in the media. She listened when LGBT activists called out the malicious neglect as akin to genocide.

****

Initially called 'gay cancer' (used 3 July 1981, New York Times) then GRID, 'gay related immune deficiency' (used 11 May 1982, New York Times) the name AIDS, officially adopted in September 1982, quickly became standard as people who weren't gay men: hemophiliacs, injection drug users, and Haitian immigrants, were suffering the new illness. 

1984, April. Announcement that the cause of AIDS has been identified: a retrovirus discovered a year before by the french. An american scientist applied for the patent on a test for virus antibodies that will become available in 1985. The virus will not be named HIV until 1986.

[ https://www.factlv.org/timeline.htm ](https://www.factlv.org/timeline.htm)

1985, summer. AIDS hysteria hits the general population amid media speculation of an imminent heterosexual epidemic.

[ https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1987-12-21-mn-20241-story.html ](https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1987-12-21-mn-20241-story.html)

After the death of Rock Hudsen, AIDS stories in the mainstream media more than tripled in six months. Life, July 1985 (cover): "Now No One Is Safe From AIDS.", Time, August 12, 1985: “the threat to heterosexuals appears to be growing." The hetero public went from ignoring AIDS to panic over it. The idea to quarantine people living with AIDS is current, and supported by prominent right wing politicians. Proposals to do so are advanced in Texas and California. The government of Cuba will actually do it, imposing universal HIV testing and mandatory removal to sanitariums from 1986-1993, marring their otherwise exemplary and very effective response of universal health care, free condom distribution and intensive sex education. 

1985, September. Ronald Reagan, who was destructively silent and criminally unresponsive to the crisis finally deigns to say a word on AIDS, in answer to a question at a press conference. His answer highlighted the harm of his willful blindness: he stated it had not been proven that AIDS was not transmissible by casual contact. In fact, CDC had ruled out casual contact as a route of transmission in 1983. It will be May 1987 before Reagan gives his first and only speech on AIDS.

1985\. CDC recorded 8161 US deaths by the end of 1985.

1986\. Safe sex goes mainstream: after CDC finally recomends the use of condoms as a possible prevention against AIDS in August 1985, the hetero population are advised to use them to reduce risk.

[ http://movies2.nytimes.com/library/national/science/aids/102386sci-aids.html ](http://movies2.nytimes.com/library/national/science/aids/102386sci-aids.html)

It will be 1987 before FDA declares condoms useful for HIV prevention, and a ban on advertising condoms in the US will remain until 1988. Condom ads will not be shown on TV until 1993. Attempts at condom distribution programs were considered 'radical' by the right wing government and faced tremendous push back from religious organizations who lied, telling the public that condoms were not effective in preventing HIV transmission. In 1994 the Catholic League will place ads all over the New York subway system falsely claiming “Want to know a dirty little secret? Condoms don’t save lives.”

The Catholic encyclical Humanae Vitae (On Human Life), released in 1968, had defined use of any contraceptive, including condoms, as a sin against god. This stance did not change, even when it became apparent that condoms are the best protection against HIV/AIDS. The stance has directly caused millions of people worldwide suffering and death that could have been prevented.

1986\. A catholic vatican letter to its bishops states, “Although the particular inclination of the homosexual person is not a sin, it is a more or less strong tendency ordered toward an intrinsic moral evil” adding “even when the practice of homosexuality may seriously threaten the lives and wellbeing of a large number of people its advocates remain undeterred” and gave instruction to withdraw support from “any organization which seeks to undermine the teaching of the church” on homosexuality. In 1985 vatican's spokesman on social teachings had described AIDS as "natural sanction” against immoral behavior.

Protestants were worse. Hateful preachers insisted the epidemic was the justice work of their wrathful god. Jerry Falwell, founder of Moral Majority, a national effort to elect right wing candidates where early fundraising appeals include a "Declaration of War" on homosexuality, said "homosexuality is moral perversion ... We do reap it in our flesh when we violate the laws of God. "AIDS is not just God's punishment for homosexuals, it is God's punishment for the society that tolerates homosexuals." Reagan's communications director Pat Buchanan argued that AIDS was "nature's revenge on gay men." Billy Graham denounced LGBTQ activism and referred to homosexuality as a “sinister form of perversion,” and “an ungodly spirit.” Addressing the mainstream Conservative Political Action Conference, Paul Cameron, publisher of a series of fraud-science pamphlets claiming that gay people commit more serial murders, molest more children, and intentionally spread disease, used the AIDS crisis to suggest "the extermination of homosexuals" may be necessary. 

1986\. CDC recorded 16,301 US deaths by the end of 1986. 

1987, May. With the approval of a more efficient Western Blot HIV antibody test, the Reagan administration mandated testing for visa applicants and ban on travel or immigration to the US by people living with HIV/AIDS. The policy will remain until 2009.

The implementation of the test for punitive purpose normalized and encouraged stigma.

HIV testing for people without identifiable AIDS illness, which has no truely effective treatment until 1995, will remain controversial and largely unadopted throughout the early 90's, as profound stigma means even admitting you are at risk can result in life destroying discrimination. The predictable result was vast numbers of people who did not know they were HIV positive passing the virus to others.

1987, July. Reagan signed the Jesse Helms amendment , which bans the use of federal funds for AIDS education materials if they “promote or encourage, directly or indirectly, homosexual activities.” 

1987, August. After a Florida School Board refuses to allow HIV positive brothers, Ricky (January 28, 1977 – December 13, 1992), Robert (January 27, 1978 – October 20, 2000) and Randy Ray (born June 3, 1979) to attend school, a Federal judge orders admittance of the three young hemophiliacs. After the August 5 ruling, hysterical neighbors refused to allow their children to attend school, and the Ray family home was destroyed by an arson fire on August 28. The family had left the house over safety concerns and were not harmed in the fire. 

1987, October. The AIDS Memorial Quilt is displayed for the first time, on the National Mall in Washington, DC as part of the National March on Washington for Gay and Lesbian Rights. The next year it will start touring the US, to constant media attention, until 1996. 

1987\. Gallup poll finds 68% of americans think AIDS the most urgent health problem facing the country. 53% think the government is not doing enough about the problem of AIDS. 51% agreed with the statement: 'it's people's own fault if they get AIDS.' 43% agreed with the statement: 'AIDS is a punishment for the decline in moral standards.' 42% reported avoiding associating with people they suspect might have AIDS. 42% expressed concern about getting AIDS themselves. 21% agreed with the statement 'People with AIDS should be isolated from the rest of society'.

[ https://news.gallup.com/poll/4324/AIDS-Issue-Fades-Among-Americans.aspx ](https://news.gallup.com/poll/4324/AIDS-Issue-Fades-Among-Americans.aspx)

1987\. CDC recorded 27,909 US deaths by the end of 1987. 14,646 are recorded as dying of AIDS that year.

1988\. That 'HIV Infection' is a single inevitable continuum where virtually every carrier will ultimately develop AIDS becomes apparent. In June 1985 the case definition of AIDS had been revised to include only patients who test HIV antibody positive. There followed in 1987 classification of 'AIDS Related Complex', defined as HIV caused illness less severe than full blown AIDS. The discovery of pre-symptomatic HIV behavior, that before any symptoms appear the virus proliferates wildly in the blood, confirmed recent suspicion based on consistent findings that the single factor most predictive of HIV progression to AIDS was simply how long a patient had been a carrier. Drug treatments are tried to keep HIV at low levels, slowing immune system damage and progression to AIDS.

[ http://web.archive.org/web/20170707113213/https://www.nytimes.com/1987/09/08/science/the-doctor-s-world-aids-virus-always-fatal.html ](http://web.archive.org/web/20170707113213/https://www.nytimes.com/1987/09/08/science/the-doctor-s-world-aids-virus-always-fatal.html)

[ https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/library/national/science/aids/102388sci-aids.html ](https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/library/national/science/aids/102388sci-aids.html)

1988, May. In an unprecedented action in response to public panic, US Surgeon General C. Everett Koop mailed the AIDS education pamphlet “Understanding AIDS” to every household in the United States. [ https://stacks.cdc.gov/view/cdc/6927/ ](https://stacks.cdc.gov/view/cdc/6927/)

1988, September 12. The Queen of the Damned is published.

1988, December 1. First World AIDS Day declared by the World Health Organization.

[https://www.hiv.gov/hiv-basics/overview/history/hiv-and-aids-timeline ](https://www.hiv.gov/hiv-basics/overview/history/hiv-and-aids-timeline)

1988\. CDC recorded 46,344 total US deaths by the end of 1988.

1989\. CDC recorded 70,313 total US deaths by the end of 1989. 

1990\. Congress passed the Ryan White (CARE) Act, giving states funds for AIDS care. It required each state to certify that its criminal laws were sufficient to prosecute people with HIV who knowingly exposed another to HIV. Many states criminalized possible HIV exposure as a result. These laws have stayed on the books even as understanding of and treatment for HIV has evolved.

1990\. CDC recorded that a total of 161,073 americans had been diagnosed with AIDS by the end of 1990. 26,076 were diagnosed that year. There had been 100,813 total US deaths.

The sheer terror of exposure to HIV and inevitable ugly death from AIDS traumatized sufferers, survivors, and society as a whole. The number of new diagnosed continued to grow larger every year, peaking in 1993. In 1992 AIDS became the leading cause of death for US men ages 25 to 44. In 1994, AIDS became the leading cause of death for US women ages 25 to 44. Deaths peaked in 1995, the year 48,371 americans died of AIDS. 

362,004 americans are recorded by CDC as having died directly of AIDS related illnesses in the years when it was a death sentence, 1981-1996. That number does not count those who were driven to self destruction in the face of it and have 'suicide' or 'overdose' on their death certificate. 

[ https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/library/national/science/aids/022590sci-aids.html ](https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/library/national/science/aids/022590sci-aids.html)

It was very much a mini-holocaust, and by 1985 we knew that it was going to be. Anne knew it was going to be. Into the midst of it came the awareness that the epidemic in developing countries, especially in Africa, had the potential to be absolutely catastrophic. African political leaders were unresponsive, denying outright that there was a problem. Christian and Muslim leaders shouted about 'immorality' and encouraged stigma, preventing education and condom use. And there we have the crux of Akasha's plan: having decimated the stigmatized group who she claimed 'brought it on themselves' and 'deserved it', she will focus her power on a second phase; using religion and propaganda to bring widespread death and suffering to impoverished, vulnerable populations, human beings who she will label 'sinners' but in honesty simply do not matter as much as her dogma and will be sacrificed to it.

Unless of course, people stop it from happening.

Neither having sex nor using drugs causes HIV, any more than eating causes salmonella food poisoning. It's microbes that cause the illnesses. Shitty luck and lack of knowledge about and access to sufficient hygiene measures: no condoms, unsterile needles, contaminated blood products, were to blame. Yet we witnessed our loved ones hypocritically called 'immoral'. We witnessed them gleefully condemned by hateful pigs, rejected and abandoned by people they should have been able to count on, abused by bigots and misogynists, dehumanized and criminalized for their illness. We witnessed while they desperately tried to hide Kaposi's sarcomas and the physical wasting of their bodies because they were recognisable, stigmatized markers of their illness and made them targets of that horrific treatment.

The right wing government was not just negligent, failing to take timely action. They actively tried and succeeded in doing us terrible harm. Due to the shameful mishandling of the epidemic, to this day HIV is more common in the US than any other industrialized country. A catastrophe of uncounted deaths that could have been prevented if leaders had focused on providing the necessary tools: education, condoms, and sterile needles to prevent the spread of the microbe rather than blaming 'immorality' for illness and attempting to use infectious disease to further social engineering agendas, is ongoing to this day. CDC statistics: as of 2016 703,413 deaths had been recorded, 23.8% of them women. There were 1,008,929 people living with HIV in the US, 38,640 were diagnosed that year. Americans live longer with HIV now, and they live with hope. But they still die of it. There were 15,807 deaths from HIV in 2016, over a thousand more than the death toll recorded in the year 1987.

Tools proven to end suffering are in our hands: comprehensive sex education, destigmatization and decriminilization of victemless human behaviors that have always existed and always will, access to condoms and sterile needles, universal healthcare, testing, ART, PrEP and PEP medication regimens. You will notice that very few of those tools are 'recent ideas'. It is past time to practice compassion and solidarity, to insist they are made accessible to everyone, that the 'little people' stop being destroyed.

_"Many believe the inaction was due to homophobia. I think that’s a bad word. Homophobia has the connotation of being fearful. _ _This wasn’t fear; it was hatred." _

~C. Everett Koop, Surgeon General of the United States 1982 - 1989, commenting years later on the Reagan administration's record during the AIDS crisis.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I am pleased to hear all opinions and do not moderate public comments. Email is in my profile. Let's talk about it.


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